The Space Between

There are hidden messages everywhere. The way
we blink, stumble, pause before speaking. The way she carried her
purse and the way you forgot to ask for a receipt are all codes
for larger things that we all leave undeciphered. It is all in that
space and the emptiness of almost hello’s and waking up alone.

He wore designer jeans and an old T-shirt. He stumbled around his
apartment as if he were some lost astronaut floating between the
couch and the walls. He lived in a constant search to discover messages
that would make him happy but never seemed to find the ones that
others left for him. Like the five unplayed messages on his cell
phone or postcard from some far away unknowable place like Canada.

Canada. He had been there once in the French speaking city of Montreal.
It was a work-related trip that did not require the planning or
expectation for an eclipse. Montreal, if you have never been there,
is a city that has been designed to interpret lost messages and
reflect them in its architecture. The people speed by and zap each
other with electricity as each of them fill a groove especially
designed for them. All the while the buildings cast long shadows
that provide shelter and warning. It is a city that lives and dies
at the same time.

He left Baltimore and arrived in Montreal on a Sunday. Somewhere
over Philadelphia his mind began deconstructing the universe he
left behind. He looked down out of his plane window to the mass
of farmland that is America. The unknown America of cows and cornfields
holds no special meaning for him but he felt for the first time
that perhaps it should. He took mental pictures to dream about later.
A moment passed and he thumbed The Sun Also Rises. Perhaps
he would come to understand the bulls after all.

He would have liked to believe that in his first two nights in
Montreal he was being filled with the essence of the city. That
spending hours at a bar with Australians have changed him. That
watching local girls dance naked or nearly naked on stage he was
somehow connecting with the underbelly of a culture. As if he was
doing something more than being passively involved with action,
with movement, with life. He would like to believe and think many
things about many things.

He would also like to remember the exact moment he first saw her.
He was sitting in a lecture room at the Palais des congrés
listening to the speaker explain the differences between classic
“netmon” polling and the newer more sophisticated advanced
polling engine of Network Node Manager 7.5. There was a bang, a
disturbance in the force, that pulled his attention away from the
speaker to look behind him, to find the cause of the noise or maybe
just to break the monotony of the lecture. And there she was, legs
crossed with notebook on her lap and pen in her hand. A thin scarf
ran around her neck and around his mind to a debilitating effect.
He turned to face forward again leaving the message of the loud
noise unanswered.

The lecture ended and she quickly made her way out the door and
he followed without a single idea of a plan. Three or four thoughts
occur to him and vanish like dust. She stopped in front of a trashcan,
no doubt to let the moment settle itself for a conclusion. Finished
her coffee and threw away the empty cup. He adjusted his satchel
on his shoulder and sighed. He smiled softly as he watched her and
the moment drift away from him into the large crowd at the Palais
des congrés.

“Gone,” he thought to himself.

He sought to erase her from his mind rather than to become plagued
by the weight of his inactions and her devilish silence. He believed
one should always prepare for the future by releasing the present
and dreaming the past. The past is nearly always forgotten or will
be soon enough so it is better to dream it than anything else. It
is the present which nearly always presents the greatest obstacle
to moving forward unencumbered, the way astronauts move, the way
he moves, in open space; that stumbling unencumbered way of bouncing
from one moment to the next unaware of leaving or finding messages,
unconcerned about presently presenting himself as anything but himself.

He found her later in the day. Or she found him? They made plans
to attend the free dinner gala being put on by Hewlett-Packard for
the 1,500 attendees of the conference. She made a comment about
the last two nights alone in her hotel room eating salads and drinking
berry flavored vodka drinks trying to forget everything she left
behind. That she was sad did not register with him right away. She
did not seem sad to him, no familiar and obvious clues were seen.
She was not crying and her eyes did not drift from him. She did
not fidget with her hands or sigh excessively. She seemed alert,
sharp, and decisive. Only when she mentioned the present weight
of her sadness did he have any sense of it. She peeled an orange
and he thought of Tennessee.

That night she drank wine and he drank Gin and Tonic. They talked
and laughed and ate politely. The food was cleared and the music
began playing. His newfound Australian friends joined them outside
and her business friends from Chicago joined them too. The merry
party swayed unknowingly to the rhythmic heartbeat of Montreal.
The men starred at her breasts and she floated around, a butterfly
dangling from a cool jazz note. Each of the men reached as high
as they could to catch her, stretching their fingers like experiments.
One offered a cigar, another bought her flowers. He shrugged his
shoulders and looked out to the clouds.

“You know sometimes I sit on my balcony at home and watch
the planes fly by at night. I pretend they are aliens coming to
take me away.”

“From what?”

He paused and offered a half smile in attempt to lighten the words
but said nothing and squeezed her hand as if he were a ghost.

She kissed him and he instinctively bit her bottom lip. She was
a jazz note hanging on the air and he was chalk falling from pool
cue. She caught herself by surprise with a sigh. She said she was
as relaxed in that moment as she had been in a century. He touched
her face and felt the world vanish. They danced close and she laughed
at his ridiculous movements. The other boys came to interrupt but
he no longer cared. He let go of the present moment and became larger
than the room.

He went to her hotel room. She kissed him and he took off her shirt.
Her nipples were hard and he rolled his tongue around them. He bit
her collarbone and she moaned with her legs wrapped around him.
But there was no sex, no lovemaking. He let his fingers glide across
her forearm, he let his mind drift off to imagine cricket noises
instead of television. She stayed perfectly still except when the
light touch became too much and she twitched and shivered. She caught
his eyes, beautiful and sad, drifting to some other world.

“What are you thinking about?”

He would tell her nothing and smile.

Was it gravity pulling him close to her? A sense of being telling
him that he belonged there, next to her, holding her. Still she
stayed, perfectly still. Waiting perhaps for the moment to seize
itself. She dared not move, and he wondered if her mind raced and
if she heard even one bit of the movement in the clouds. She smiled
and made mention of being on a flying couch, spinning about the
room, wondering who would light the fuse and when.

His fingers moved her hair behind her ear and then followed her
jawbone to her chin. He thought of kissing her then, but waited
for the dust to settle. He waited for this moment to seep into memory
and fill him with the marrow of the unsaid life. Like fresh snow
fall on an empty playground.

She slept on her side and he held her. She said she felt safe and
secure and went to sleep quickly. He was soon after falling asleep
while tracing poems on her back with his finger.

The next day they spent time together walking the streets of Montreal.
The city bathed them in the light of new lovers. They went to Pino’s
on Crescent St. and sat at the best table over looking the street.
Their stories were told over wine and the foot traffic below.

They walked and held hands. Each made a lifetime of dreams and
it all made sense in the streets of Montreal. The city is living
and dying at the same moment and so were they. She was flying home
to Milwaukee the very next day and he was flying home to Baltimore.
They didn’t speak about it or pretend it wasn’t happening.
They walked to China Town and stood in the shadows of the buildings.

“Why were you sad earlier in the week?”

She smiled and pulled him closer. She said nothing but he understood.
It was a message he could feel beyond words. Sometimes he felt as
though there were more beautiful things in what was not said and
what was not done.

He said goodbye to her in front of the crosswalk and she walked
away and never turned around. Never yelled back “I’ll
miss you” or some other sweet nothing to fill the growing
space between them. She just walked across the street and on to
her future.

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